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Monday, July 23, 2012

Where Obama Shines

Published: July 19, 2012

It won’t help him win many votes this year, but it should be noted that
Barack Obama has been a good foreign policy president. He, Vice
President Joseph Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the rest
of his team have created a style of policy making that is flexible,
incremental and well adapted to the specific circumstances of this
moment. Following a foreign policy hedgehog, Obama’s been a pretty
effective fox.

Some eras call for bold doctrines, new global architecture and “Present
at the Creation” moments. This is not one of those eras. Today, the
world is like a cocktail party at which everybody is suffering from
indigestion or some other internal ailment. People are interacting with
each other, but they’re mostly focused on the godawful stuff going on
inside. Europe has the euro mess. The Middle East has the Arab Spring.
The U.S. has the economic stagnation and the debt. The Chinese have
their perpetual growth and stability issues.

It’s not multi-polarity; it’s multi-problemarity. As a result, this is
more of an age of anxiety than of straight-up conflict. Leaders are
looking around warily at who might make their problems better and who
might make them worse. There are fewer close alliances and fewer sworn
enemies. There are more circumstances in which nations are ambiguously
attached.

In this environment, you don’t need big, bold visionaries. You need
leaders who will pay minute attention to the unique details and fleeting
properties of each region’s specific circumstances. You need people who
can improvise, shift and play it by ear. Obama, Clinton and the rest
are well suited to these sorts of tasks.

Obama has shown a good ability to combine a realist, power-politics
mind-set with a warm appreciation of democracy and human rights. Early
in his term, he responded poorly to the street marches in Tehran. But
his administration has embraced a freedom agenda more aggressively since
then, responding fairly well to the Arab Spring, rejecting those who
wanted to stand by the collapsing dictatorships and using American power
in a mostly successful humanitarian intervention in Libya.

Obama has also shown an impressive ability to learn along the way. He
came into office trying to dialogue with dictators in Iran and North
Korea. When that didn’t work, he learned his lesson and has been much
more confrontational since. Early in his term, he tried nation-building
in Afghanistan. When that, unfortunately, didn’t work, he scaled back
that effort.

Obama has managed ambiguity well. This is most important in the case of
China. When the Chinese military was overly aggressive, he stood up to
China and reasserted America’s permanent presence in the Pacific. At the
same time, it’s misleading to say there is a single China policy. There
are myriad China policies on myriad fronts, some of which are
confrontational and some of which are collaborative.

Obama has also dealt with uncertainty pretty well. No one knows what
will happen if Israel or the U.S. strikes Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Confronted with that shroud of ignorance, Obama has properly pushed back
the moment of decision-making for as long as possible, just in case
anything positive turns up. This has meant performing a delicate dance —
pressing Israelis to push back their timetable while, at the same time,
embracing their goals. The period of delay may be ending, but it’s been
useful so far.

Obama has also managed the tension between multilateral and unilateral
action. No one can say he is hesitant to work with coalitions. Look at
the Libyan action, or the Iranian sanctions. But when it comes to
decimating Al Qaeda, the U.S. has been quite willing to go it alone,
continuing and expanding many policies of George W. Bush.

There have been failures on Obama’s watch, of course. Some of these flow
from executive hubris. Obama believed that he could help resolve the
Israeli-Palestinian dispute. He proceeded clumsily, pushed everybody
into a corner and now peace is farther away than ever.

Some failures flow from excessive politicization. An inexcusable blunder
by Obama was to announce the withdrawal date from Afghanistan at the
same time he announced the surge into Afghanistan. That may have kept
the Democratic base happy, but it sent thousands of soldiers and Marines
on a mission that was doomed to fail.

Over all, though, the record is impressive. Obama has moved more
aggressively both to defeat enemies and to champion democracy. He has
demonstrated that talk of American decline is hooey. The U.S. is still
responsible for maintaining global order, for keeping people, goods and
ideas moving freely.

And, partly as a result of his efforts, the world of foreign affairs is
relatively uncontentious right now. Foreign policy is not a hot campaign
issue. Mitt Romney is having a great deal of trouble identifying
profound disagreements. If that’s not a sign of success, I don’t know
what is.